Lead Drupal Developer

Department of Finance; Canberra; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

The Department of Finance seeks an experienced EL1 Lead Drupal Developer to provide technical leadership for Drupal platform development, ensuring secure, scalable, and high-quality service delivery across PaaS and SaaS offerings. The role emphasizes security, platform stability and engagement with stakeholders.

The successful candidate will guide architecture decisions, mentor junior staff, work in an agile environment and contribute back to the Drupal community while maintaining compliance and

Qualifications

• Advanced Drupal platform development and architecture.
• Strong security, compliance and risk awareness.
• Experience with DevOps practices and cloud services.
• Proven ability to lead development teams and set technical direction.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience in an agile environment.

Responsibilities

• Provide visible technical leadership for Drupal platform engineering and set direction for secure, scalable solutions.
• Coach and mentor developers to improve practices and code quality.
• Lead development activities and oversee release discipline and uplift.
• Collaborate with product, security, infrastructure, and operations teams.
• Ensure accessibility, security, and compliance in platform services.

Skills

Drupal platform development

Security mindset

Technical leadership

Communication

Agile delivery

Interpersonal skills

Analytical skills

System thinking

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Ansible

AWS

GitHub

GitLab

JIRA

CI/CD

Job description

The Department of Finance is seeking an experienced EL1 Lead Drupal Developer with strong security and platform engineering expertise to support whole-of-government digital products. The role provides technicalleadership, strategic direction and oversight of Drupal platform development, while ensuring secure, scalable and high-quality service delivery across Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings.

The role contributes to maintaining platform stability, meeting security and compliance requirements, supporting strategic initiatives and strengthening development capability within the team.

The successful candidate will:

• Have strong technical, communication, interpersonal and analytical skills.
• Lead and provide direction in development activities.
• Support and mentor junior staff.
• Work effectively in an agile environment.
• Actively contribute back to the Drupal community.

The key duties of the position include:

In addition to the broader capabilities outlined in the Finance People Capability Framework, Finance is seeking candidates who possess the following job specific skills and attributes aligned to our core capabilities:

Lead

• Provide visible technical leadership for Drupal platform engineering, setting direction for secure,scalable and maintainable solutions.
• Exercise sound judgement on architecture, security and operational trade-offs, escalating risks clearlyand early.
• Coach and mentor junior and graduate developers, building confidence and consistency across development practices.
• Model integrity, stewardship and accountability in decisions that affect whole-of-government services.

Collaborate

• Build constructive relationships with product, security, infrastructure, service operations and supplierstakeholders.
• Translate complex technical issues into clear advice for non-technical decision makers.
• Create inclusive technical discussions where different views are tested and incorporated into delivery decisions.
• Represent Finance professionally in cross-team forums, working groups and service discussions.

Achieve

• Deliver reliable platform outcomes across development, release, support and uplift activities.
• Prioritise work in line with operational risk, platform stability, security obligations and strategic value.
• Drive code quality, automated testing, release discipline and continuous delivery practices.
• Maintain focus on measurable service outcomes, including reliability, accessibility, compliance and maintainability.

Think

• Identify platform risks and opportunities before they affect delivery or service quality.
• Apply systems thinking to how Drupal, AWS, Salesforce, CI/CD, security controls and service operationsinteract.
• Research Drupal AI capabilities, modules and integration options to support responsible innovation.
• Use evidence, logs, engineering analysis and stakeholder insight to inform technical recommendations.

Learn

• Promote a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing and technical curiosity.
• Keep current with Drupal, DevOps, cloud, accessibility, security and responsible AI practices.
• Share lessons from incidents, releases and uplift activities to improve team practice.
• Support others to develop capability through mentoring, review, documentation and practicalguidance.

Know

• Advanced Drupal platform development and architecture.
• Secure coding with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
• DevOps, CI/CD, GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, Docker, Kubernetes and Ansible.
• PaaS/SaaS operations, AWS-hosted services and enterprise platform integration.
• Accessibility, WCAG, security assurance, risk and compliance in regulated environments.
• Digital product roadmap contribution and technical stakeholder engagement.

Eligibility

• Under section 22(8) of the Public Service Act 1999, employees must be Australian citizens to be employed in the Australian Public Service (APS) unless the Agency Head has agreed otherwise, in writing.
• Successful applicants will be required to undertake the process to obtain and maintain, or continue to hold the required security clearance level for the role as indicated in the downloadable job pack. All Finance staff are required to have a minimum baseline security clearance prior to commencement.
• We encourage and welcome applications from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with Disability, LGBTQI+ people, people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and mature aged people.

Getting to know the Department of Finance

As a central agency of the Australian Government, the Department of Finance (Finance) plays an important role in assisting government across a wide range of policy areas to ensure its outcomes are met. Finance supports the government's ongoing priorities through the Budget process and fosters leading practice through the public sector resource management, governance and accountability frameworks. Finance plays a leading role in advising the government on many of its strategic priorities. We do this through our professional and considered approach to providing advice, developing policy, delivering services and engaging with our clients and stakeholders. Finance's key areas of focus are:- Budget- Business Enabling Services- Commercial- Governance and Resource Management